Thursday, February 14, 2013

Gallery walls

There's something terribly bleak about pile upon pile of the ephemera of past lives – dead people's stuff – and so much of it, that with each step I feel increasingly forlorn, if not downright depressed. It's not that I'm creeped out by the modern equivalent of grave goods still awaiting decent burial or burning, it's more that the amount of crap (and there's no other word for it) that has been produced, is still being produced, and will continue to be produced. This is not to say that none of it is without value be it to poor families, young marrieds looking to impress the subdivision, pickers, the recyclers of 60s and 70s worst moments, the taste-bereft or the aesthetically unrestrained.

If I were still suffering from visual and moral dyspepsia after yesterday's tour of a flea antiques market I might take a jaundiced view and say that, occasionally, I feel restraint is long gone from interior design and with it also are gone the underpinnings of history, utility and balance. I might wish my view were not so jaundiced and there certainly are times when my negativity is denied but I am sure of one thing and it is that balance is not understood or, at least, not often apparent, or even appreciated in today's interior design as seen in magazines and books. It is very hard nowadays to get a balanced idea of how a room works – there's a wealth of visual information in the form of vignettes, partial views and close-ups but actually to see how a room functions in relation the people who use it is a rare treat.

So, you might ask, what has got me on this path. In a word, Pinterest. Don't get me wrong – I don't dislike Pinterest, but my ability as a twenty-first-century man living at this week's apex of technological advancement to use a lot of time looking at pretty pictures (dogs or rooms, it doesn't matter) is truly worrying. I cannot blame Pinterest for that. These photographs below and their ilk, from a Google search, have led me to rethink the placement of five drawings (they hang in a row) on our living room wall – remove them altogether or leave one.

It's not just the incoherence, absence of balance, or the seeming unconsidered nature of the relationship to the wall and the room itself that bothers me: it is that they are not contained (in my old-fashioned way, I prefer disparate images to be contained, grid-like, within an implied border and despite asymmetry have balance) and appear to disperse from more than one centre. Also, it looks as if someone spent a lot of time trawling flea-markets – in itself not a bad thing, unless you're me, that is.

I realize, also, these present day asymmetrical arrangements of images and objects, so-called gallery walls, are not just reactions to static, yawn-inducingly-traditional groupings, such as in the photograph below, but a definite but not extreme attempt in their beginnings to enliven a modern way of living in traditional interiors. Now these gallery walls are a fad and as to whether that is a bad thing the jury is still out. What I do know is that asymmetry is hard to achieve without an eye educated about balance.

There are precedents of course, not few and far between: two literally gallery walls (Uffizi and Royal Academy) and they share a common purpose – display, both artistic and social - with the following two (Van Day Truex and William Pahlman). I'm not sure if Pahlmann's is an in-store display or a residence but either way that display of artwork above the cabinet must have seemed wonderfully modern at the time. Pahlmann's work is a little hard to assess at this remove but that is a discussion for another day.

John Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772

William Powell Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881

Van Day Truex, 1944

William Pahlmann, 1950s

Behind this discussion (rant?) about placement of pictures on walls are thoughts I've been having about walls just being allowed to be themselves and not just supports for art or artifacts. Not revolutionary, this idea of having walls bare except for an applied finish, but it occupies me and I would like to discuss it in the near future.

29 comments:

I must admit that I like the idea of gallery walls. But most have no music, no unifying rhythm, pattern, symmetry or color to make the whole more than the sum of their parts. I think ya gotta have an eye for that.

I agree with you. I think it's their ill considered nature that makes them well, inconsidered. Whoever put these pictures up spent very little time thinking about what the overall visual effect would be, so we end up with a complete mess. I only hang pictures that I want to see and enjoy. I have many in storage, even though if I literally lined the walls with them they might fit, they would all be lost in the miasma. The Zoffany and Powell Frith pictures are of a gallery, so that's allowed, but of course any curator today would rightly disapprove, for the reasons I have said. Less is definitely more, and if a picture is unworthy, don't bother hanging it. Seriously.

columnist, thank you. As to not hanging of an unworthy picture, I completely agree with you. The problem is knowing a worthy one from its opposite. A connected problem and perhaps the subject of a future post is the lighting (with picture lights) of mediocre art and even worse, whilst I'm on the subject, is allowing the cord to show.

To each his own. When hanging pictures for others, I give the option, be it 'grid', 'wallpaper', 'architecture', etc. Ideally, the residence is large enough so the variety of layouts can be used, each in a different room, to give visual relief and to avoid monotony.

If there is good natural light with ever-changing differences in shadow and coloration, plain light-reflecting walls can be very satisfying.

Dear Blue, I do so love your writing, almost (I admit) regardless of what you have to say. But in this (and many, many other) cases, what you write rings true and has depth and substance to it. Walls jammed with pictures hung in a jumble are fine in one's study or (god forbid) one's "sanctuary" room. But I believe that one's more public spaces (I wonder: do any of these people actually have guests over for a visit--I doubt it) should be more ordered and serene (at least that's the way I thnk about mine). "Eclectic" has become an excuse for "sloppy" and "ignorant," in my view. Yours curmudgeonally, Reggie

"This idea of having walls bare" is not the whole idea (not that you suggest that it is) of having walls, "bare." Walls are incurably not bare, even if empty of debris, as I rediscovered to myself in refinishing all of my walls (I reject the distinction of a public space, but I get what is suggested; all space we inhabit is implicitly personal, even when defaulted). Centuries of family portraits, oddities of personal creative vanity or sentiment, statements of values and expression, per se, reside in protecting boxes, anyway, whether we call them rooms or crates; my spaces present liberty, protection, warmth, courtesy, and stimulation to me, through geometry, light, and color of the moment, as our movement redefines it, constantly; and one single picture changes everything. But I do not pretend to be a designer or a designer's client, while I nevertheless believe that our eye forgets nothing that we value, as our ear forgets nothing in Mozart or Shakespeare. We like to listen to what we like, yes; but we breathe to hear.

I look forward to that future note you are suggesting. No doubt, you have seen Terestchenko's photographs from a great collector's house, "redecorated" to exhibit no more than two things, ostensibly, but to hold, need I say, abundantly more.

Oh, Laurent, thank you. Trust you to spot the point of logic I knew someone would pick up on! And you're right, bare walls in fact are never bare for even with a new layer of plaster there is colour and texture. A discussion that could go on for hours very pleasurably over a glass or two, I'm sure, but that's for another day.

I did not mean that contribution as a pedantic refinement of terms; rather, as an expansion of an existing implication. But here is another, and very material: your argument on behalf of balance extends, by implication, greatly beyond any question of symmetry in the deployment of objects to veil a structure, to the question of the exhaustion of the plane, itself. At some level - I would suggest, at the most basic one - it's not germane whether one adopts a grid or a praying mantis to hang one's "collection." I thought you were on your best ground in observing that. :)

I could not tell (you probably know) from the examples you cite in Truex and Pahlmann, whether the room maker thought it a great idea to expose the collection in this way or simply ran out of walls in accommodating a client's compulsion. Either way, the impression is one of a forcible compression, exalted by custom or practice as it may be. It's in this zone where the matter of balance seems, as you suggest, definitive.

That is a wonderful photograph and I'm glad you showed me, but it's not the one! I'll try to find a good image for you. My reference comes from an old radio program he broadcast in the 50's which is an utter delight to listen to on trips in the car. My children grumble at first then we end up almost as captivated as we are.

Gallery walls can be visual cacophony at the very least. I tried it in my home with a collection of nudes, all painted by the same hand. That provided me with the cohesiveness needed to make the assemblage look somewhat pulled together. But, as you know, that gallery wall is no longer assembled!

Your collection of drawings to which you refer looks cohesive because, as I recall, they were all framed in silver toned frames? Or am I mistaken?

In theory, I have no problem with gallery walls: not, at least, any more problem than I have with any other passing fad--red walls, faux-finished walls, Chinoiserie, whatever. No, my problem is with things done badly.

Just because trendy people were enamored of Chinoiserie in, say, the Rococo period didn't make the style "bad", although early adopters of tapering legs & satinwood might have thought so. I can hear them now: "That chair is soooo 1750s!" Like that was a bad thing.

Same with gallery walls. They can be done well--think early Mario Praz--but they can be pushed to extremes, even when their component parts are good, as in late Mario Praz. The guy didn't know when to stop. But when you throw a bunch of mediocre pieces(or worse) into the mix, well, you get those three terrible rooms at the top. Not good design, not even bad design, they're examples of no design at all, of Entropy in Design.

But, just as I wouldn't ever do a gallery wall simply because other people were doing them, I also wouldn't avoid doing one just because other people were doing them badly, because both reactions--copying or abjuring--are simply different ways of allowing other people to call the aesthetic shots for us. Are we men or are we mice?

In such cases, it's duty of people of taste (such as ourselves) to show other people how to do things right, regardless of whether those thing are popularly deemed "In" or "Out". That's the advantage of having absloute confidence in your own taste: whether you decide to go with a group of five pieces of art, or a single one, or with a bare wall, you already know the end result will be good. And that's all that matters.

Simply Grand, thank you and my apologies for a later response. I fully agree with you and beyond stating my agreement, I'm at a loss how to show your comment the respect it deserves.

My drawings are an experiment that, frankly, has not worked and seeing the pictures at the top of the post and many more like them on Pinterest ..... well, you know what I mean when I say our own homes are our laboratories. I'm a tinkerer, I suppose, and always want to experiment.

The single image or object has not yet been bought and the walls are in for a total rethink. High-gloss lacquer is always an option – popular at present – as it was thirty years ago when Kevin McNamara and Mario Buatta were doing them. I know that whatever the walls become they will have to fit with our life rather than with a fad.

Wonderful post, Blue and a helpful nudge to edit...something I'm not very good about doing. How do you edit when everything has a memory? Fortunately I am blessed with a very large attic. Our walls have at least three hidden hooks behind every painting and print so I can happily rearrange as the mood strikes.

I love your comment, "the underpinnings of history, utility and balance" to which I might add, restraint.

I'm doubly at a loss on this. This month JoAnn and I (and many others) lost our dear Gordon. He hung every single picture in our house. Among other things he dug through our (now adult) children's closets and hung 15 of their works knowing the delight it would bring, which it has. Anyway, Gordon had the eye and the experience and we don't. How will be find someone to replace him as designer? Impossible to replace him as a friend.

Terry, my condolences. I didn't know Gordon except through your blog and it's clear you'll miss him. To replace him as a designer? Why would you if you learned from him? As to replacing a friend – it'll never happen. They're too precious and too rare.

I said "doubly." This is also on my mind: a gallery wall in perpetual flux. One of my favorite times in a gallery was when the owners pulled out work to show clients. The space went from 20 curated, neatly hung paintings to 50 strewn about the gallery. That was fun. Every addition, subtraction, and move made a different look. In an hour it was back to the 20 that would hang unchanged for six more weeks.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the late 80's I remember a visit to my dad's favorite coffee shop. The walls had been sponged painted, happily but not well. I thought then by the time a trend hits a small Oklahoma down it should be shot to put it out of its misery.

On the other hand, I applaud all people who know what they like and do it regardless of what might be said about it. Trends come and go. Brass is now rising from that heap of contempt and is glowing in rooms all over cyberspace.

Your home is your story, tell it the way that pleases you, makes you smile or as Smila writes evokes a memory.

If you know the English word "bollocks" you'll understand the depth of my reaction when I saw brass being touted again as the latest piece of design quackery. Clearly someone has never seen the green oxidation that ruined many a porcelain bathtub and I wonder if they ever had to maintain or clean the darn stuff. Fatuous piece of marketing, if ever I saw one.

Trends do influence all of us, some less so than other. Once you've lived long enough you realize its a 40-year cycle before something comes round again – often no better than it was the first time.

A home is personal, or should be, an album certainly and yes, it should evoke memories. Ours, as I suspect yours and Smilla's does too.

Timely discussion. Earlier today I posted a few left over images of massed 'art'. I appreciate both the random (when executed correctly which generally depends on the room, the art and the taste & talent of the person placing the art) and symmetrical. Personally I lean to the symmetrical...but of course I would.

A.J. Barnes, thank you. I read your post this morning and to be honest there was little I disliked amongst your photographs. Like you, I lean towards the symmetrical - of which you have many excellent examples – though we have one asymmetrical arrangement that is beginning to annoy the heck out of me.

About Me

An interior design history enthusiast and in my own way an erstwhile chronicler of those I call the Lost Generation - those men, some of them gay and many of whom died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, and who are to a great degree forgotten.